In 1841, Scottish journalist Charles Mackay detailed how entire nations lose their minds at the same time.

From financial manias to holy wars and everything in between.

His conclusion? Men think in herds. They go mad in herds.

They recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

You think you're too smart to fall for a scam? You aren't. (thread) 🧵 Mackay studied the madness across centuries and cultures. The same mechanism repeated every time.

A nation fixates on one object. Gold. Tulips. Land. Crusade. Witch trials.

Millions become simultaneously impressed with a single delusion and chase it until something shinier comes along.

What does the cycle look like?

In 1784, the French government sent Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier to investigate a man who claimed he could cure any disease by waving his hands.

Thousands of Parisians believed his claims. Even the queen endorsed him.

What the commission found is a warning for every age.

"Trust the experts" has always been used to exploit the credulous. (thread) 🧵 The man was Franz Mesmer.

He arrived in Paris in 1778, claiming he had discovered an invisible magnetic fluid that pervaded all nature. He could channel it through his hands and into the sick, and doing so could cure anything.

A prominent physician named D'Eslon converted to his cause. From that moment, magnetism became the fashion in Paris.

Western civilization is not declining. It is already dead. What you are living in is the corpse.

In 1918, a German philosopher studied every civilization that collapsed and found they all shared one trait in the final stage:

The population stops having children.

And it stops having children because it no longer sees the point.

His work was mocked, dismissed, and debated by 400 scholars. But he was right (thread) 🧵 Schoolteacher Oswald Spengler published his work that rejected the idea that history moves in a straight line from "primitive" to "progress."

He called this the Ptolemaic view of history. We place ourselves at the center and assume everything is building toward us. A form of chronological snobbery.

He offered a more Copernican view: every great civilization is its own world. Egypt, China, India, Babylon, Greece, Rome, the West. Each one blooms and dies according to the same pattern.

None is the "goal" of another.

Harvard's first chairman of sociology, Pitirim Sorokin, spent decades analyzing every major civilization in recorded history to answer one question:

Why do great cultures die?

His answer, published in 1941, predicted almost everything happening today.

Down to the collapse of the family, the death of art, and the rise of tyrants. Maybe even the popularity of TikTok.

(thread) 🧵 Sorokin identified three types of culture that every civilization cycles through:

1. Ideational — Reality and value are rooted in the supersensory. God is the organizing principle. Art, law, science, and family all serve the Absolute.

2. Idealistic — A synthesis. The supersensory and the sensory are blended. Think fifth-century Athens or thirteenth-century Christendom. Noble, selective, and sublime.

3. Sensate — Only what you can see, hear, smell, touch, and taste is real. Everything beyond the senses is dismissed as fiction.

Every great culture moves through these phases.

The question is: which phase are we in now?

Sir John Glubb, a British Lieutenant General, spent 36 years commanding armies in the Middle East.

He studied every major empire in recorded history and found something he didn't expect.

Every single empire (Assyria, Persia, Rome, the Arabs, the Ottomans, Spain, Britain) lasted about the same length of time.

250 years.

And they all died the same way. (thread) 🧵 Glubb mapped out six stages that every empire passes through.

1. The Age of Pioneers — a poor, obscure people suddenly explodes with energy and courage

2. The Age of Conquests — disciplined military expansion

3. The Age of Commerce — wealth pours in, merchants replace warriors

4. The Age of Affluence — money replaces duty as the goal of life

5. The Age of Intellect — universities multiply, debate replaces action

6. The Age of Decadence — selfishness, frivolity, and collapse

The cycle is clockwork in its regularity.

José Ortega y Gasset watched Europe triple its population in a single century and asked:

What happens when the average man, raised in unprecedented comfort, decides he owes *nothing* to the civilization that made his life possible?

His answer, written in 1930, predicted the exact world we live in today. (thread) 🧵 Ortega divided humanity into two types.

Type 1: The noble man. Someone who holds himself to standards beyond what is required. He seeks difficulty. He imposes obligations on himself. Life for him is discipline and striving.

Type 2: The mass-man. Someone content to be identical to everyone else. He demands nothing of himself. He floats. He thinks nothing of watching 5+ hours of TV on a Saturday afternoon.

In 1895, a French social psychologist named Gustave Le Bon published a book so dangerous that it became the private playbook of dictators for the next century.

Hitler quoted it. Mussolini kept it by his bedside. Edward Bernays used it to build modern propaganda.

The book's name? "The Crowd."

Its core claim: The moment people form a group, they become stupid. Not slightly dumber. Fundamentally, structurally incapable of rational thought.

And the tactics he described for controlling them still work on you right now. 🧵 (thread) Le Bon's first defined what a "crowd" actually is.

A crowd is not just people standing near each other. A thousand strangers in a train station are not a crowd. A crowd forms when individual consciousness dissolves and a collective mind takes over.

Six people can be a crowd. An entire nation, separated by thousands of miles, can be a crowd. The question is not proximity. The question is whether individual judgment has been surrendered.

In 1377, a North African scholar studied every empire and dynasty to answer one question: why do civilizations always collapse?

What did he find? That soft, effeminate men destroy every empire within 3 generations.

No exceptions.

His work reads like a description of the modern West, and almost no one has heard of him. (thread)🧵 Ibn Khaldun, in his book The Muqaddimah, looked at the Arab empires, the Persians, the Romans, the Berber dynasties, and dozens of others.

He asked one question: Why do civilizations rise, and why do they always fall?

There is one force that builds every civilization and one force that destroys it.

In 1377, a North African scholar studied every empire and dynasty to answer one question: why do civilizations always collapse?

What did he find? That comfort and luxury destroy every empire within 3 generations. No exceptions.

It's a prophecy for the modern West(thread)🧵 Ibn Khaldun, in his book The Muqaddimah, looked at the Arab empires, the Persians, the Romans, the Berber dynasties, and dozens of others.

He asked one question: Why do civilizations rise, and why do they always fall?

There is one force that builds every civilization and one force that destroys it.

How to make your wife despise you.

1. Always ask for permission.

Treat your wife like your mom.

Never do anything on your own initiative and never make any plans without asking if you’re allowed to do it. Don’t just join the gym. Never plan a night out with friends.

Pretend that you’re just being considerate when really you want to foist all the responsibility onto her. 2. Overshare

Gossip like a woman to your wife, as if you’re just one of the girls.

Vomit out your feelings at every opportunity. Burden her with every little anxiety and fear. Make a habit of crying often. Treat her as an emotional crutch.

Act like an absolute mess at the merest hint of failure, conflict, or difficulty.

How doing the laundry and cleaning the house helps conquer the world.

It makes sense once you think about it. Civilization thrives when noble women stay home to manage their households.

If women refuse to work at home, civilization regresses.

🧵👇 A growing civilization depends upon men who are willing and able to take responsibility for others beyond their own households.

These men must be able to pay attention to things external to their immediate interests.

33 lessons every father must teach his son:

1. Do not gloat in victory.

Everyone already knows you have won. Gloating turns defeated opponents into lifelong enemies. Being gracious in victory creates lifelong friends.

Point out something they did well, and ask how they did it. 2. Do not whine in defeat.

You will gradually get fewer and fewer invites, and you will never get better at the thing you just lost at.

Every loss is a moment to learn, but if you are a sore loser, no one will want to teach you.

Young men are begging for a noble cause to suffer for, to struggle alongside brothers in the arena.

Will they find it at your church?

They know they've found it only when they see the pastors and leadership suffering for the truth. Fighting where the wall is under siege. A lot of young men will be flocking to churches, begging for something to suffer.

If your answer is anything other than leading by example, and then saying "go and do likewise," you will lose them or neuter them.

A Colombian philosopher spent 80 years writing fragments that read like prophecies.

Known as the "Nietzsche from the Andes," he rarely left his library and published books that almost no one read.

His name was Nicolás Gómez Dávila, and he would have dominated X. Some bangers:🧵 “In an age in which the media broadcast countless pieces of foolishness, the educated man is defined not by what he knows, but by what he doesn't know.”

You'll be more informed about current events by reading old books than by watching the news.

Wall-E is not the movie you think it is.

is often celebrated or dismissed as environmentalist propaganda. This misconception is understandable. The film pummels the audience from the opening credits with a cartoonish version of human waste, prodigality, and corporate excess. Towers of trash have replaced skyscrapers and the earth is bereft of all life except for robots and cockroaches.

If you asked a 6-year-old what the Earth would look like if adults kept littering, he might draw a similar picture.

A recent study highlighted what everyone already knows, deep down.

Divorce places a generational curse on its children. The effects last for years, and unless someone stops the bleeding, they are passed down to the grandchildren.

Divorce is bad even for adult children. Household income plummets by 50% and never fully recovers, even after a decade.

What a young man does in his 20s will set the course for the rest of his life.

Here are 7 ways he can screw it up:

1. Waste time and strength on worthless pursuits.

A man will never have more energy and strength than in his 20s.

He can use that energy to build something. Instead, many men waste their strength on video games, binge-watching entertainment, and nights at the bar or club.

A man won't have the same energy in his 30s.

If you spend your 20s wisely, your 30s, 40s, and beyond will be so much easier. And your competition will be low.

What does every culture in the history of the world have in common?

None of them treat men and women equally. All of them have different roles for men and women.

ALL of them.

Here are the 4 patterns they all have in common: 1. Sexual division of labor.

Every culture divides tasks between men and women. These tasks can change from culture to culture (though there is remarkable consistency), but the division is always there.

The types of tasks men perform across cultures are similar. Same for women.

Peter Jackson committed many sins against Tolkien. None worse than his butchery of Aragorn.

The books show us a KING who knows exactly who he is.

The films gave us a whimpering man questioning his birthright.

One commands respect. The other begs for validation. (thread) 🧵 Book Aragorn has no character arc.

This was intentional.

From the moment we meet Strider at the Prancing Pony to his coronation, he knows who he is.

The story gradually reveals his greatness to others, not to himself. Aragorn is a constant anchor for other characters to grasp.

8 ways to make your wife despise you.

1. Always ask for permission

Join the gym. Plan a night with friends. Invite people over. Your wife is not your mom. If you always ask permission, you're asking her to be a husband.

Being considerate is not the same as asking permission. 2. Overshare

Don't gossip like a woman to your wife.

Don't vomit out your feelings at every opportunity.

Don't burden her with every little anxiety and fear. Don't make a habit of crying at the drop of a hat.

Ask for counsel. Ask for help. Don't ask for an emotional crutch.

11 truths every man must hear before he becomes a father.

1. You will let your children down.

You are not perfect. You will never "do the best you can."

It's not ok that you let them down, but it's inevitable. Repent, apologize, and do better. An example every child needs. 2. Your words are more powerful than you realize.

Your words have the power of life and death. They will live in your children's bones for their entire lives. How you speak to them will be how they speak to themselves.

Keep your promises. Control your temper. Measure each word.